Your staff - better. The rest is just the details.

Team-building vs team working

Team-building is for when you've got people who want to be together and are going to be together for a while. If that's the case, it's worth some teambuilding! On the other hand, a lot of teams are really just a bunch of people doing related jobs and who may be moved on in fairly short order. At that point you might not consider team building and team development to be worth the effort… but don't despair, because team-working tools are designed for exactly that sort of situation.

Why do team-building?

If we define a work-group as a collection of people working towards the same end, they might have a fixed output or productivity level. The idea is that teambuilding or team-working will allow the members of the team to work together better, perhaps by understanding each other better or communicating better, so that the output/productivity of the team goes up. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The opposite - where the whole is actually lower than the sum of the parts - is called an 'Apollo Team'. You might have the best individuals in the world, but if they can't work together as a team, they just get in each other's way. Ever seen a national sports team where the best players from sides within that nation are brought together… but the result is 11 strangers on a football pitch not passing the ball to the right place at the right time?

Models of team-work

There are dozens of models of teams, team development and team-work. As the statistician said: all models are wrong but some models are useful.

We'll cover all the traditional schools of teamwork that you'd expect but then add some of the more flexible and robust systems, particularly the Disney Model. We'll also draw pretty heavily on MBTI if that's appropriate.